Tuesday, January 22, 2013

House ad for The Doom Patrol #86 (March 1964, the first issue of their comic after being renamed from My Greatest Adventure);
printed in Batman #162 (March 1964)
Comic cover art: pencils and inks by Bob Brown
Ad designed and lettered by Ira Schnapp

4 comments:

PS: The B&W screen — which had a blue tint on the actual cover — was all the more unusual given that it came during a period of particularly purple gorillas on DC covers, as my gallery of such covers shows if you scroll down about a dozen tiers. (It's a post that suffers more than most from me not using alt-text to identify the images, sadly.) Good ol' Julie Schwartz had gorillas and the color purple on his list of attention-grabbers, along with fires, jail, and dinosaurs, which explains why those elements were often mixed 'n' matched on his books. The monochrome of the monitor was likely to put it in better relief with the "actual" figures in the foreground.

None come to mind but I wouldn't rule it out. Some homage to Schwartz's list of bizarrely compelling cover elements (all of which were derived from tracking sales info) might have thrown 'em together. If you look at the cover gallery I linked to, you'll find gorillas in jail in what I and many others consider DC's first "official" Gorilla Cover. Mark Waid added dinosaurs (including a purple one) and a pink mist, if not exactly fire, to the ape-laden cover of Secret Origins #40 in tribute to Schwartz. While I don't recall tears being on the list, and I can't drag the issue out now to reread the letters page, between this and Alan Moore's Weeping Gorilla in the cultural hodge-podge of Promethea I suspect that it might have been.